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Most Informative Coronavirus Articles

Now, with two co-workers under 4-years constantly trying to “help” me during business hours, most of my ‘spare’ time (see: when they are sleeping) has been dedicated to catching up on work, but I do think it’s important to stay informed on what’s going on with this (hopefully) once in a lifetime black swan event. And, since mainstream news insists on providing infotainment, instead of education and our government entities (WHO, CDC, U.S. Surgeon’s General, et al.) have all shared misinformation (see: let us down), I’ve sought out my own sources and shared them with you below.

5/31/2020:

Complete coronavirus primer. “In this article we provide a one-stop, curated graphical source for the key numbers (based mostly on the peer-reviewed literature) about the SARS–CoV–2 virus that is responsible for the pandemic. The discussion is framed around two broad themes: The biology of the virus itself, and the characteristics of the infection of a single human host.”

5/17/2020:

The alphabet agencies continue to fail us via their incompetence. The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Lumping together tests for active coronavirus with those for recovered patients, muddies the process of tracking the pandemic’s course.

5/10/2020:

An impressively clear explanation of how the virus often spreads inside confined spaces, like restaurants, churches, workplaces and schools.

Even when people remain more than six feet apart, they can become infected by breathing the same air as an infected person for an extended period of time, Bromage explains. Those scenarios, he argues, are more worrisome than a quick trip to the grocery store or almost any outdoor activity.

A retrospective study found that for each standard deviation increase in serum vitamin D people were 7.94 times more likely to have a mild rather than severe COVID-19 outcome and were 19.61 times more likely to have a mild rather than critical outcome.

Scott is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank. He was the 23rd Commissioner of the U.S. FDA (serving from 2017 to 2019) and his Twitter coverage has been the best, most informative that I’ve discovered regarding COVID19.

4/12/2020:

Max Roser and his team at Our World in Data are consistently one of my favorite resources for curating and interpreting data. Only on the basis of clearly presented and well-documented data can governments, organizations and individuals hope to respond appropriately to the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of their work is to present the best available data and clarify what can – and can not be said – based on this data.

If you’re getting restless and starting to wonder, “How will we get our lives back?” this article is worth your time. We still need more time to get better therapeutics in our toolkit, serological testing, contact tracing, etc. before we can start re-opening and, even then, it should be done in phases.

This page presents all our content related to the COVID-19 crisis and other useful resources. It covers key information about the crisis, how to use your time and money to help the world tackle it effectively, ideas on how to personally cope, and how to use your career to help prevent future pandemics.

4/5/2020:

This is a nice compliment to the John’s Hopkins case count dashboard. No governmental or institutional source is publishing complete testing data—including not just identified cases, but how many people have been tested, and where. Without this data, we can’t make informed decisions or accurately communicate risks. The Covid tracking project aims to remedy this.

3/29/2020:

Using cell phone location data, Unacast created this interactive Scoreboard, updated daily, to empower organizations to measure and understand the efficacy of social distancing initiatives at the local level.

Speaking of social distancing, many prominent U.S. voices have are worried the “cure” (i.e. social distancing) is worse than the impact of COVID. Tom Inglesby, the Director of the The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, argues that with the exponential growth of the virus, social distancing is critical to prevent our health care system from becoming overwhelmed. (Tom has been out in front of this from the onset. His Twitter is a great resource for COVID19 information right now.)

It’s true that the risk of dying from coronavirus is higher for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions but, as evidenced by the article above, this is not just something older people should be worried about. (I try to be careful with n=1’s, but was alarmed that 42-year old healthy lawyer and marathoner, David Lat, was ventilated for 6 days with coronavirus—one of very few people who have been put on a ventilator that lived. He’s documented the experience in full on Twitter.)

Very interesting read: The crisis viewed from Germany; a plain-worded exploration of the trade-offs between public health and productivity. Governments have handed authority to scientists who understand the mathematics and biology of epidemics but not necessarily the social and political fundamentals. By locking down cities and countries we can reduce the spread of disease; but we also encourage “fear, isolation, depression and domestic violence”. Should one paper — from Imperial College — change a billion lives?

3/22/2020:

Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.

Amazing Covid-19 related simulation from the always brilliant Kevin Simler. It’s a “playable simulation,” meaning that you can tweak the parameters (like transmission and mortality rates) to visualize how they impact the spread of a disease and how the epidemic might unfold. If you “play,” you’ll likely develop a better understanding for what it will take to contain this virus.

One of the most pernicious parts of the COVID-19 crisis is how uncertain everything is. Researchers and officials cite statistical models that estimate infection rates, death counts and when things will go back to normal, but those estimates are changing rapidly. And as the forecasts bounce around, so do the rest of us living through the crisis.

Great data visualization that illustrations why the most extensive travel restrictions to stop an outbreak in human history haven’t been enough. We analyzed the movements of hundreds of millions of people to show why.

The coronavirus is coming to you. It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly. It’s a matter of days. Maybe a week or two. When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed. Your fellow citizens will be treated in the hallways. Exhausted healthcare workers will break down. Some will die. They will have to decide which patient gets the oxygen and which one dies. The only way to prevent this is social distancing today. Not tomorrow. Today. That means keeping as many people home as possible, starting now.

In this episode, Dr. Paul Grewal, M.D. joins Peter to discuss what they have learned in the past week in the midst of the rapid changes surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Their conversation touches on both optimism and uncertainty: actionable steps we can take to improve the situation with the understanding that it is too late for viral containment. Specifically, Peter and Paul discuss some promising drug treatments, reasons for isolating-behavior adoption, and what they are personally instituting in their own lives.

Balaji is one of the reasons I was sounding the alarm about the coronavirus in late Jan/early February. He was way out in front of this thing. This special pop-up episode explores Covid-19, with Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji and Shane are two of the more thought-provoking, interesting, and multi-disciplinary thinkers I know and they do a deep dive, which includes possible second and third-order consequences.

[For what it’s worth, my official stance is that, if you have any extra masks you should immediately donate them to nearby healthcare professionals, but any argument that “masks don’t work,” is a lie designed to ensure healthcare workers have enough PPE. It’s disingenuous. Every country that has this under control has citizens that overwhelmingly wear masks. Any type of general mask use is likely to decrease viral exposure and infection risk on a population level, in spite of imperfect fit and imperfect adherence.]